DF vets prove the inscrutable game can be something other than a torture device.

Not long ago, I tried to play an insanely difficult-to-understand game called Dwarf Fortress. It was hard. It was nigh-impenetrable in terms of its mechanics and interface. I spent a good long time helplessly watching the best minds of my dwarf clan destroyed by madness, thirst, and mysterious tantrums. I got exactly nowhere without the most explicit and procedural instructions, and even then progress was slow, painstaking, and shadowed by failure (or as DF fans refer to it, “fun”) at every step.

But there are more than a few endlessly patient souls who have pushed through those early trials (some for hundreds of hours). These survivors exhibit such agency with the game that they not only live, but thrive next to threats like volcanoes and necromancy towers. Following the Ars article, a number of DF forumgoers took it upon themselves to flip our 10-hour challenge on its head: what could a handful of experienced players accomplish in 10 hours? Just how far could they get?

In a contest to develop the most interesting scenarios, the players voted amongst themselves and came up with both a winner and runner-up fort for their usage of time and diaries they kept during their 10 hours of play (both paused and unpaused time counted towards the total). Even though all players were longtime veterans, one was forced to resign from the contest due to a “level 10 aquifer.”

Enlarge/ A massive underground room where it appears Thatdude mined for stone.

The winning fort, built by user Thatdude, set out not to make a fort, but to build an entire above-ground town. The user gave each dwarf its own personal house—not a trivial task, given that standard procedure is to dig a hole in the ground and throw the dwarves in, as opposed to collecting and processing enough materials to create dozens of structures.

Integral to Thatdude’s success was trading (read: stealing) goods from visiting humans and elves. Waves of migrants (homeless dwarves who show up and want to live with you) had generally pointless jobs and children (really just mouths to feed until they grow up). This did not help the situation.

Around the five-hour mark, a hill titan (a “colossal grouse that shoots webs”) entered the map and proceeded to rend the landscape and murder innocent dwarves. A short time later, a “tantrum spiral” begins, which Eric Nelson, another veteran player, describes as a dangerous scenario that “can kill even the biggest or best defended forts.” Why? The destruction comes from within.

According to the DF wiki, a tantrum spiral begins with a single unhappy dwarf who becomes possessed of a rage and starts throwing items around or starting fistfights. The dwarf will get punished, but if his punishment is too severe, more dwarves have tantrums as a result. This creates a chain reaction of “fun.” Thatdude started the spiral with 84 dwarves. Two hours later, the last berserking dwarf is put down, and the fort is down to a population of 21.

Enlarge/ Where Thatdude buried all of the spoils of his dwarves' tantrum spiral, i.e., the results of "fun."

By the time Thatdude hits 10 hours, he has a room for every living dwarf, and a grave and marker for all except the last one to die. The end population is 87, with 67 dead and 4 years of in-game time elapsed.

The runner-up fort, built by forum user Mishrak, started out as an attempt to roleplay a tie-in to Ars’ attempt to play the game. Sadly, “fun” quickly got involved and Mishrak ran out of time. He did, however, manage to build a tribute room dedicated to Ars out of gold and magma, which eventually became residence to a dead necromancer and bodies of the fallen.

Mishrak embarked near a necromancy tower and a volcano, which are apparently just things that crop up for funsies in a game like DF. Both are bad scenarios waiting to happen: necromancy towers, as in fiction, produce “zombie sieges, necromancer migrants, and vampires.” The volcano, as in real life, periodically results in large-scale destruction and hot, fiery death.

Enlarge/ Where Mishrak embarked, bordered on most sides by threats of doom.

Enlarge/ Mishrak's gold-and-magma-encrusted room constructed as a tribute to Ars, eventually filled with dead bodies. The message is not lost on us.

Mishrak set about finding water (there was none above ground, so he had to dig 121 levels down to find a subterranean water source) and creating booze, an element that is “one of the most critical factors in the success or failure of a fort,” he said. “Dwarves that have no alcohol won’t be able to work efficiently and will work twice as slow… it’s on par with necessity of fresh food and water in terms of fort survival.” An enviable game mechanic.

The golden Ars room Mishrak built was not just a room, but a 20-level-deep pit over which Mishrak put a drawbridge to his colony. Any time an entity tried to cross the bridge, Mishrak could pull a lever and drop them, sometimes to their death, into the Ars room. Some beings survived the fall, including the necromancer, who can reanimate corpses into zombies. “Were I to continue with the fort,” Mishrak said, “it would have been even more glorious a room—filled with zombie goblins and other things.”

Enlarge/ The surface level of Mishrak's fort, with the drop bridge in the upper center region.

The semi-deadly trap seemed to avoid the problem of tantrum spirals, as the enemies weren’t being willfully murdered by anyone other than gravity. Unburied or unmemorialized dwarves lying around can also cause tantrum spirals, but since the corpses were sealed off in a room, they couldn’t cause tantrum spirals either. “I’ve a feeling I’m not too far from a siege,” Mishrak wrote.

Early on in the essay describing his fort, Mishrak wrote that he “tried to open HFS” but encountered problems digging under the magma sea. I asked what HFS was. “HFS is a code name for a spoiler,” Mishrak told me.

“I can spoil it for you if you want,” he said. “Or you can get good enough at the game to where you hunt for adamantine or dig REALLY deep and find out for yourself.” New players are said to be just getting the hang of the game after hundreds of hours and dozens of failed forts. And my minimal progress is widely known after less than half a day with the game. This is an anxiety-inducing, daunting proposition.

Promoted Comments

The game really isn't all that hard to get into, if you accept that the UI sucks and is horribly unintuitive and you won't get far just by experimenting. You'll have to look up information on the wiki or in tutorials, and refusing to do that is just an exercise in frustration.

In 10 hours you can easily go from being a complete beginner to having a fairly successful fortress.

It's only impossible to get into if you refuse to look up information elsewhere. It's also missing the point of the game, because the fun *really* isn't in trying to figure out which key to press to order an elephant killed or a tunnel dug out.

Download Dwarf Therapist, watch a few of captnduck's tutorials on Youtube, and you're ready to make fortresses within an hour or two.

I have no experience with this game whatsoever beyond reading the last article on Ars that described it as a torture-like experience. I'm hoping against all hope that what you say is true- that it can be mastered quickly- because with a UI like the one shown in those screenshots, I have no doubt this is a game capable of making people lose their sanity. I'd prefer to keep mine intact if I get a chance to try the game out.

I think it's true. The trick is just to accept any help you can get. Don't try to be tough or think "I can figure this out on my own." You can't. But if you let others teach you (wiki or youtube), then it's not too bad.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

60 Reader Comments

The game really isn't all that hard to get into, if you accept that the UI sucks and is horribly unintuitive and you won't get far just by experimenting. You'll have to look up information on the wiki or in tutorials, and refusing to do that is just an exercise in frustration.

In 10 hours you can easily go from being a complete beginner to having a fairly successful fortress.

It's only impossible to get into if you refuse to look up information elsewhere. It's also missing the point of the game, because the fun *really* isn't in trying to figure out which key to press to order an elephant killed or a tunnel dug out.

Download Dwarf Therapist, watch a few of captnduck's tutorials on Youtube, and you're ready to make fortresses within an hour or two.

The game really isn't all that hard to get into, if you accept that the UI sucks and is horribly unintuitive and you won't get far just by experimenting. You'll have to look up information on the wiki or in tutorials, and refusing to do that is just an exercise in frustration.

In 10 hours you can easily go from being a complete beginner to having a fairly successful fortress.

It's only impossible to get into if you refuse to look up information elsewhere. It's also missing the point of the game, because the fun *really* isn't in trying to figure out which key to press to order an elephant killed or a tunnel dug out.

Download Dwarf Therapist, watch a few of captnduck's tutorials on Youtube, and you're ready to make fortresses within an hour or two.

I have no experience with this game whatsoever beyond reading the last article on Ars that described it as a torture-like experience. I'm hoping against all hope that what you say is true- that it can be mastered quickly- because with a UI like the one shown in those screenshots, I have no doubt this is a game capable of making people lose their sanity. I'd prefer to keep mine intact if I get a chance to try the game out.

The game really isn't all that hard to get into, if you accept that the UI sucks and is horribly unintuitive and you won't get far just by experimenting. You'll have to look up information on the wiki or in tutorials, and refusing to do that is just an exercise in frustration.

In 10 hours you can easily go from being a complete beginner to having a fairly successful fortress.

It's only impossible to get into if you refuse to look up information elsewhere. It's also missing the point of the game, because the fun *really* isn't in trying to figure out which key to press to order an elephant killed or a tunnel dug out.

Download Dwarf Therapist, watch a few of captnduck's tutorials on Youtube, and you're ready to make fortresses within an hour or two.

I have no experience with this game whatsoever beyond reading the last article on Ars that described it as a torture-like experience. I'm hoping against all hope that what you say is true- that it can be mastered quickly- because with a UI like the one shown in those screenshots, I have no doubt this is a game capable of making people lose their sanity. I'd prefer to keep mine intact if I get a chance to try the game out.

I think it's true. The trick is just to accept any help you can get. Don't try to be tough or think "I can figure this out on my own." You can't. But if you let others teach you (wiki or youtube), then it's not too bad.

In my opinion, the reason you had such a hard time was because you deliberately crippled yourself. You took a game that's legendary for being difficult, and insisted that you wouldn't look at any outside data whatsoever, that you'd just sit at the keyboard and figure out what you could figure out.

That's fine, if you want to, but that makes an already-hard game many times harder. The very first people to experiment with DF had to do that, but many of them, as you note, put in hundreds of hours. They probably didn't do any better than you did, in their first ten, maybe not even that well. But I think they were also sharing experiences in the forums... "hey, I figured out X", so that they could all be puzzling away at it simultaneously.

I've got a LOT of hours in DF, probably not as much as some of these guys, but I'm pretty good at it. And I still, to this day, consult the Wiki regularly, just to make sure I'm right about how something works. I wanted, for instance, to bring magma up from the depths to power some magma forges, so I reviewed several methods that have been invented, and settled on using a stack of screw pumps -- and I took advantage of what other people had learned, and made the 'catch' areas for the stack 3x3 instead of 1x1, so that it wouldn't lag the game too much while it was running.

Could I have done that on my own? Absolutely. But I would probably have made a lag generator, because I didn't understand how the temperature engine worked.

I also note that the Wiki instructions were far from perfect; they gave you a basic idea, but actually building the stack took a fair bit of thinking, because of the problems with access to the pump locations, and the problems with the way pumps stack on top of each other. The people doing the Wiki are very helpful, and mean well, but they are often not terribly good at explaining things.

So you set yourself a goal that was already very difficult, and then deliberately made it nearly impossible. Of course you didn't have a lot of fun. DF has a community for a reason.

Stick with it a little more, and consult the Wiki heavily, and you'll probably find that it's a pretty good game.

The problem was that the writer's original premise-- trying to discover the game without referring to docs-- is utterly the wrong approach. I tried to play Dwarf Fortress once, and gave up. I'm no fan of it, but I would never be so obtuse as to expect the game to have an intuitive UI when it is famously known for having the exact opposite. Simply trying to fit the square peg of DF into the round hole of 'expecting the UI to explain itself' is not a problem with the game, it's a problem with the player.

The tough part about Dwarf Fortress is it will take some effort and thought to learn the basics. It's not something you can jump into and learn as you go unfortunately, as most games are designed to be. You really have to use it in conjunction with the wiki and the forums until you get used to the game.

If you go through some of the tutorials on the forum (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=28477.0) or on the wiki, you can learn the interface that way. Once you have a semi decent understanding of the mechanics, you can learn a ton from watching Captain Duck's tutorial videos on youtube.

I actually had 3 pages of paper notes where I would write down details about certain fundamental rooms Captain Duck was making, so when I made my own games, I would know what I was doing. After awhile, you memorize the basics and they become second nature and that's when the game starts to get really fun. But you have to put in the effort to get past the learning curve.

Another thing, perhaps, worth pointing out: remember that most of the veteran DF players started multiple revisions ago, back when it was all on one level.

2D Dwarf Fortress was a much simpler game, much easier to understand, and I still, years later, wish he hadn't gone 3D. What I really wanted, and still want, is 2D Dwarf Fortress with the (many!) bugs fixed.

Learning that version was way, way easier than the monstrosity that it's grown into.

I tried DF after the original ARS article, and I was able to play it, and for a while found it fun (plain English fun). Afterwards, however, I grew tired with the lag that large games bring, and more importantly with the inevitable destruction (DF meaning of Fun!) of everything I had done. That is by design, complexity and difficulty grow exponentially and the only way to build a fortress able to go indefinitely is by not digging too deep, not making it too big, or too rich... in short by not really playing the game.I guess I am not made for so much Fun. The game remains impressive though.

I've had a number of affairs with Dwarf Fortress - slowly making progress each time. When I manage to keep everything running smoothly for an hour or so, I'm ecstatic! That you put yourself into this environment without consulting the wiki, I can only attribute to craziness or lack of comprehension of what Dwarf Fortress really is.

Whenever I go to play a god game (or similar) now, though, I look for the maddening complexity that Dwarf Fortress brings. Many games feel shallow to me now. And so, Dwarf Fortress continues to make me rage, even once I've left it.

am i understanding the game, there is no real end but an inevitable collapse of your society?

at which time you take note of the years passed and size of your fort as some kind of "score" (for lack of a better term)?

It isn't really a game by the standard definition. It's a toy, that incorporates several game-like elements for the purpose of procedurally generating stories in conjunction with the player. So it isn't something you win (unless you've set specific goals for yourself), it's more something you experience. The difficulty mostly arises from the bewildering detail involved. For example, to make a well you need a source of fresh water, a gear mechanism, a rope, a block and a bucket. To make a bucket you need a carpenter and some wood. To get some wood you need a woodcutter and an axe. To make an axe ect. ect. You get the picture. It doesn't exactly lend itself to a concise, easily understood UI, never mind that you're doing it all second-hand through your dwarves. But as the poster said above, it leads to some amazing stories, amazing triumphs, and amazingly frustrating defeats. Mostly defeats. The journey is the thing.

You'll have to look up information on the wiki or in tutorials, and refusing to do that is just an exercise in frustration.

I picked up Dwarf Fortress for the first time a few days ago. While I agree with you about tutorials being necessary, I did enjoy the spirit of the first article. As I was getting started with the game, I feel like I read too much of the wiki. I ended up reading about all the common varieties of Fun, and so I knew how to avoid them in the first place. For example, I'm sure my early fortresses would have succumbed to a Forgotten Beast had I not known about them ahead of time.

I would like to see a tutorial that helps you navigate the truly confounding parts of the UI, such as "burrow" versus "mine", and having to "construct" a table before you can "build" it. It should leave other aspects up to the player to discover, like how the supply chain works from raw materials to weapons, armor and machinery.

The game is very similar to D&D where the reading the reference material is a significant portion of what makes the game fun. That is why I think the stories about peoples games are so interesting. This isn't a conventional video game for conventional people, but almost everyone I introduce it to that gives it a chance think its awesome.

I've tried Dwarf Fortress several times, twice with in-depth guides, and ended up dropping it every time.

It's a fun idea, with a horrendous implementation. Part of the problem seems to be that the terrible UI is now seen as a feature, not a bug (using tilesets so that it's actually possible to identify things is seen as cheating by most) and the game is made solely with those who already understand it perfectly in mind. If the biggest complaint about your title is that it's too confusing to play, adding new features before you make it easier to understand is not a great idea.

I tried DF a long time ago, and ragequit like most when I couldn't make sense of WTF was going on. Maybe I'll pick it up again sometime... but meanwhile, I'm quite happy with its "easy mode" bastard offspring: Minecraft!

am i understanding the game, there is no real end but an inevitable collapse of your society?

at which time you take note of the years passed and size of your fort as some kind of "score" (for lack of a better term)?

Yep, that's basically it. The only 'win' condition is 'not having lost yet'. But I think a clever player could keep a fort going nearly indefinitely. It's quite possible, with adequate time and dwarven engineering, to make a fort that's essentially impregnable.

But there is a lot to see in this game, and getting to mostly-impregnable status takes a long, long time. There are many dangers, as you tunnel ever-deeper into the earth.

These screenshots remind me vaguely of John Taylor and Kelton Flinn's Island of Kesmai which was on CompuServe back in the mid to late 80's. A D&D base, rogue-like graphics and (if you used a third party client) even *color*. I might have to try out Dwarf Fortress, though I cringe at the hours it might consume.

I really enjoyed this exchange, and I think I must set aside some quality time for this game.

After reading all the adventures and some epic sagas that people experienced in this game, the complexity of it reminds me of that "Star Trek" challenge Kirk cheated on where the end game was always death and facing death was the point of the challenge.

So it is with this game. In the end, you lose control, or are unable to recover, etc...

It also strikes me that the kind of people who can really play this madding, complex, brutally hard core thing are precisely the kind of people one needs in a disaster, or when building a new civilization, etc...

Pure awesome, if you ask me. So many rules, lots of details, complexity, options! I think the whole thing is brilliant, and again I'm gonna set some time aside for this. Frankly, I think it's a potential skill builder and well worth the experience to find out what might be learned and to at least have the adventure of the mind only a game like this can bring.

The UI needs to be hard core. That's not where the fun is, nor is the fun in just pressing buttons or anything shallow like that. From what I've seen, it's about the visualization and the game itself is a complex simulation more than it is really a game. Deep stuff, which is why people are attracted to it, and some people run away screaming as their world is difficult enough already without also understanding this parallel bizzaro world too.

I've tried Dwarf Fortress several times, twice with in-depth guides, and ended up dropping it every time.

It's a fun idea, with a horrendous implementation. Part of the problem seems to be that the terrible UI is now seen as a feature, not a bug (using tilesets so that it's actually possible to identify things is seen as cheating by most) and the game is made solely with those who already understand it perfectly in mind. If the biggest complaint about your title is that it's too confusing to play, adding new features before you make it easier to understand is not a great idea.

I'm still partial to playing old roguelike games now and then, so I thought I would feel right at home with Dwarf Fortress. So, I tried it a year or two ago, and I was referring to Wikis, tutorials, and videos. The documentation was little help at all -- as far as I could tell, the basic commands are changed between versions, and none of the documentation seemed to describe accurately the version of the game that was then current. The interface stoutly resists "exploration".

My sense is that part of the game is contending with the interface, and I imagine that many of its fans enjoy that as part of the challenge.

Dwarf Fortress is not a game you can avoid 'spoilers' from the community and community resources and progress very far. I should know - I host the wiki and I still constantly have to refer to it and the forums constantly when playing the game.

I would recommend that new players check out the following resources:

- Quickstart Guide, also known as the slowstart guide. It will take you about 3-4 hours to run through this.- Captnduck's Youtube Channel is comprehensive and bite-sized (30ish minutes per video).- Lazy Newb Pack is a quick way to get a graphical tile set and some common utilities to start playing Dwarf Fortress without any configuration.

Just be careful - if you do manage to get into the game, it's incredibly addicting.

am i understanding the game, there is no real end but an inevitable collapse of your society?

at which time you take note of the years passed and size of your fort as some kind of "score" (for lack of a better term)?

To a degree, yes, but there are a lot of giggles to be had from the emergent narrative. Tantrum spirals are usually hilarious to watch, especially when combined with multiple invader taskforces.

I had a game where I'd built myself a heavily secured fortress, crushed a couple of goblin raids and then found myself facing a full scale goblin invasion. I hit the panic button(you can zone off areas and give standing orders of which areas dwarves are allowed in. It's always worth having a panic order that will send dwarves scuttling into the depths of the fortress when activated) and closed my gates, and watched for a few months as the goblins slaughtered my livestock. After that they got bored, and the alligator that one of the goblins was riding decided to go for a swim, drowning it's rider in the process. I then tunnelled too low and found a titan buried beneath the map. The titan cut havoc through my fortress and started a tantrum spiral. I opened the gates and ordered the non-tantrum dwarves out, where they ran face first into the goblin army. Most of them were slaughtered, but then the titan found it's way out and destroyed 2/3rds of the goblin army and the rest retreated off the map. After this the titan collapsed from exhaustion and my remaing half dozen dwarves surrounded it and kicked it to death. The fortress was beyond recovery, but I don't care because it was awesome.

That should be much much easier as DCSS has brilliant user interface. And you can choose easy race/background combination which solves most of the early game, so getting to, say Lair within 10 hours should be perfectly possible.

I tried the game when it was first discussed here and after watching one tutorial I could get pretty far in the game already by just repeating what he did there. I think once you have the basic infrastructure set up and know the basic concepts of how to order people around you can try to fail on your own way (and sometimes get away with it). LazyNewbmod or MacNewbie (in my case) help a lot too. At the beginning i would disable invasions there and use it as an extra elaborate SimCity, because you will struggle enough just by getting the economy up and running. Or hunting those stupid vampires, or getting rid of ghosts... After the basics are set up and you can spend hours setting up the perfect minecart tracks (so no dwarfs get hurt), brew crazy stuff or tame some strange creatures etc. I also always play with a tileset - it makes things way easier. If (and that's a big if) you are then courageous enough to want some outside challenge - just dig down, you will find what you are looking for.

The last article was how I first heard about this game. The apparent depth got my interest and the ASCII UI gave me a nostalgic reminder of a game I played many years ago which I think was called Moria. The clincher was reading the comments after the article and in particular some of the funny stories written on forums as a consequence of playing the game. I have been playing since then and I'm getting along with it. The Wiki's and Tutorials make life easier and even with these there is still an element of trial of error. Early days I trapped my miners with slopes not knowing how to get them back out. I'm making progress and enjoying the experience. Building an underground farm involving two levels, lower level mined first and top level channeled, surface collapsed and dwarfs fell in and ended up with concussion. Built my first bridge across a dwarf made moat, built fine, but accidently killed a dwarf in either raising or dropping my bridge. ASCII is a non-issue, it surprising how quickly you get used to the letters and symbols. I ended up with a tantrum spiral in my dining hall, had no military and I looked on helpless as one dwarf created carnage killing animals and nearby dwarfs, blood everywhere. I'm still learning and enjoying!

Yep, that's basically it. The only 'win' condition is 'not having lost yet'. But I think a clever player could keep a fort going nearly indefinitely. It's quite possible, with adequate time and dwarven engineering, to make a fort that's essentially impregnable.

But there is a lot to see in this game, and getting to mostly-impregnable status takes a long, long time. There are many dangers, as you tunnel ever-deeper into the earth.

Getting an impregnable fortress really isn't that hard, you could easily do it with your starting 7 before you even get your first wave of migrants. And this is for a self-supporting fortress. (just pick your starting supplies carefully, you're going to have to spend a lot of your starting points on an anvil) Really, the hardest part is getting a safe supply of water. If you have a surface stream, you can easily pipe in that water through carved fortifications (to keep animals from swimming into your hospital), and you don't even need water unless you have injured dwarves.

Now, getting an impregnable fortress that can let traders and migrants in, that's a bit more of a challenge, but still easily done within, say, the 10 hour limit here. Heck, it's even possible to automate the entrance and exit, then only very ill-timed ambushes could get in, and, if you did it right, they still wouldn't get into your fortress proper.

If you want a simple introduction to the world of Dwarf Fortress, try Adventure Mode. In the past, Adventure Mode was a bit ignored, but Tarn has been putting a lot of work into it lately. Adventure Mode plays like a normal rogue-like. You'll get to try out the ridiculously detailed combat and interact with the world. It's a good way to get used to the icons or tileset that you decide on. While it doesn't create the epic stories of Fortress mode, it will create some really fun situations. You can gather up a group of adventurers and try to fight through a Necromancer's Tower. Since you're not dealing with running an entire fortress, the UI is much less of a problem.

The comment above that Dwarf Fortress is more of a toy than a game really confused me. I think Dwarf Fortress represents everything that games should be striving for. It's not just about creating a fortress. It's about creating an entire custom fantasy world for the player to intereact with. You can build a fortress, have it destroyed, visit it in Adventure Mode, and then reclaim it. Just looking through the logs of historical events can be really interesting.

He was comparing it to Simcity, which was called a "software toy" by Will Wright because there's no way to win. You play with it, but never get a screen where it says "congratulations you won" and records your score. The terminology hasn't really caught on -- open-ended RPGs are by definition unwinnable, and they're widely considered games -- but that's what he meant.

Impregnable fortresses are very easy to make. If you're by a river you just enclose a bit of land, put your fortress entrance in there, and bang you can only be attacked by flyers and swimmers. Goblin sieges can be problems because some Gobboes ride things like crocs or giant birds, and thievey creatures (like Kias) will probably rob you blind. But gobbo sieges that intense are a late-game development and Kias can only steal stuff you leave in the open. You're also gonna have to watch as immigrants are slaughtered, create a whole bunch of memorial stones, never trade with anyone, etc. But you will be impregnable. As long as the river doesn't freeze.

Which means you probably want to create a trap-lined corridor for Wagons/immigrants. Get the traps right and gobbo raids are doomed. You'll have to deal with Kobolds, and a really big Gobbo siege can probably afford to spring every trap in your corridor, but being de facto impregnable is also not that hard.

My DF games tended to die due to lag. 90 dwarves, a two-year-old laptop, a programmer who can;t do multi-threading (DF's "team" consists of a programmer who does almost all the work, and his brother who does some creative game-designey-type stuff), and a couple gobbo raiding parties trying to path their way into my fortress are not a good combo.

The last article by Casey Johnston - "10 hours with the world's most complex video game" or something, was clearly a slime attempt at the best game I've ever played. #dwarffortress is wonderfully intricate, and fluid, that's to say, everything happens randomly and nothing is predetermined. You have a huge amount of freedom to do whatever you want (search traps in http://www.dwarffortresswiki.org) and its just amazing.

The writer's choice to attempt to figure out the game and controls on her own, were doomed from the start. Due to the complexity, a new user doesn't have an option for, but absolutely needs to read the user quickstart guide and attempt a test fortress or two. After the initial fiasco her fortress could only go downhill, a fall which she has lovingly detailed in the smear job...article. Its ridiculous, just how many people she has discouraged from joining the game by being stubborn and refusing to consult the foremost place for help in #dwarfortress . Here's the answer by experienced players on exactly how much they can get accomplished in 10 hours. Here are some positive articles -http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2013/apr/ ... ke-losing/andhttp://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/c ... -twin.htmland here's the most famous story about it (boatmurdered)-http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/

P.S- For those unfamiliar with #dwarffortress I recommend getting started by reading the quickstart guide at the wiki. Once you get into it, its more addicting than drugs. Read "boatmurdered" if you want to get acquainted with the game mechanics of wonderful history and world generation and how the players can make monstrosities like "FlameChannel".

Another thing, perhaps, worth pointing out: remember that most of the veteran DF players started multiple revisions ago, back when it was all on one level.

2D Dwarf Fortress was a much simpler game, much easier to understand, and I still, years later, wish he hadn't gone 3D. What I really wanted, and still want, is 2D Dwarf Fortress with the (many!) bugs fixed.

Learning that version was way, way easier than the monstrosity that it's grown into.

Really? And what if your fortress covers your entire embark site? Having no z levels would remove much that is lovable from the game. For example - drawbridges, atom smashers, magma pipes and chambers etc. Having z levels allows you to keep a small surface area for the fortress (not sprawling over the embark site) and extend it however much you want (till you reach HFS of course, ). Also in adventure mode you want be able to have that D&D or nethack feel of multiple dungeons to descend into. Having no z levels would simply make the game boring after some time. Trust in Tarn Adams. He is absolutely devoted to the game and won't do anything bad for it. However he also regularly holds feedback sessions so you can voice your opinions directly to him.